08 Mar 2016
I am a Spanish student at the University of Kansas, and I just recently completed my second TalkAbroad conversation with Francisco Campos Perez from Costa Rica.
Since my first TalkAbroad conversation had gone well, I was less concerned about how to start the conversation this time around. However, I was a lot more worried about the topic we were supposed to discuss for my class assignment — “my generation.” Our instructions were to talk about the differences between our own generation and the generation of “the millennials,” but I had to tell my partner right off the bat that I had no idea what to say because I did not know the difference between the two.
Luckily, he helped start the discussion by asking what I thought defined a “millennial,” and we went from there. It was interesting to learn about the differences between college students in the United States and those in Costa Rica, especially because I am planning to study abroad at a Costa Rican university this summer. For example, Francisco said the majority of students continue to live at home while they attend university, while most of the people I know live in dorms or apartments.
When it came to the differences between generations, however, much of what we thought of was the same. Francisco talked about how our generation worries too much about materialism and appearances, and I agreed that social media probably played a role in that problem. I have to admit that even though we talk about subjects like this one all the time in Spanish class, it is pretty exciting to know that I can carry on an actual conversation with a native Spanish speaker about something more substantive than just “how are you?” and “where are you from?” Overall, it was another great experience and it hardly felt like it lasted an entire half hour.